For many years, various types of hangers in different shapes and sizes have been used to support all different types of clothing, including coats, jackets, shirts, pants and other articles of clothing. In many instances, it is useful to suspend one hanger from another hanger. This may be useful in order to display together clothes from a matched set, or perhaps simply to reduce the amount of space required for displaying or storing clothing.
Retail practices today frequently require that many products be displayed on hangers in the retail selling area. This necessarily requires an esthetically pleasing hanger on which the garment is hung prior to placing it on the retail selling floor.
During the manufacturing process, it is usual for garments to be manufactured and shipped on hangers. Such hangers are usually inexpensive hangers, which are not esthetically pleasing. When the garments with these hangers reach the retailer, it is necessary for the retailer to remove the hanger on which the garment was shipped and replace it with a more esthetically pleasing hanger for the use on the selling floor. This necessarily causes millions of hangers to be removed and discarded each year by retailers. Not only does this require a great deal of labor, but it is also very wasteful, when considering the number of hangers that are discarded.
Hangers that have some type of ganging device for supporting other hangers are known in the industry. For example, Willinger (U.S. Pat. No. 5,803,321) discloses a hanger with a hook receiving element that has intersecting passage ways for selectively receiving the hook from another hanger. One of the problems of this design is that the size of the passageways is necessarily limited and only hooks of a certain size may be used. Further, because the passageways intersect, while the hanger will permit a hook to enter from either front to back or from side to side, the ganging device cannot be utilized to support more than one other hanger at the same time. This is because the passageways intersect and necessarily prevent hooks from two different directions.
A hanger with another type of ganging member is disclosed by Blanchard (U.S. Pat. No. 4,653,678). In this device, the ganging member has a J-shaped structure, but hooks from other hangers may enter only from side to side, and not from front to back. Further, as there is only one passageway, only one other hanger may be supported at a time.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for a hanger of a simple construction that allows hooks from other hangers to enter either from side to side or from front to back and which will also permit more than one other hanger to be suspended at the same time.
Another important need in the industry is for one simple esthetically pleasing hanger that can be used for shipments of garments and then used by the retailer for displaying the same garment.